Data migration refers to transfer of data from a source system to a destination system. The source and destination systems may be computers or any devices capable of storing the data. Data migration may be needed, for example, when the source system is being replaced or upgrade, when some function of the source system is otherwise being moved to the destination system, or when the data needs to be temporarily stored elsewhere while an operation such as server maintenance is performed on the source system. Data migration may also be used to consolidate data from multiple sources. In many cases, data migration is complicated by the need to change the format of the data from a format used on the source system to a format suitable for the destination system, for example, because of differences in the way the source and destination systems store or use the data. Data migration is generally an automated process that a computer system may implement. Still, migration of a large amount of data, e.g., a database, can cause a significant amount of downtime for some services in a computer system and may consume significant computing or networking resources of the computer system.
Use of the same reference symbols in different figures indicates similar or identical items.